Leila Zia
| Tags | Infrastructure, Knowledge as a Service, Knowledge Equity, Languages, Oral Knowledge, Research, Strategy, Trust |
|---|---|
| Primary Session | Knowledge as a Service |
| Secondary Sessions | Research, Analytics, and Machine Learning |
Title: Knowledge is our direction. What's next?
Combined knowledge as a service (KAS) and knowledge equity (KE) is identified as our strategic direction (draft). We have decided to focus on knowledge in a broader sense and beyond just encyclopedic knowledge, create KE, and become the infrastructure that offers KAS. In this position paper, I offer some of my early thoughts on where we should focus our efforts to move in this strategic direction. Given the limits of word-count, I will not go through the details of research methods and techniques that can be used to address each point.
Knowledge
As the central focus of the strategic direction is knowledge, we need to arrive at a unified working definition of knowledge. English Wikipedia defines knowledge as familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something which is acquired through experience or education, by perceiving, discovering, or learning. This definition, however, is not a working definition that can help us decide what new content to include.
Research on user behavior, needs, and learning patterns can help us define knowledge.
Knowledge equity
Our goal is to remove structural inequalities that limit our ability to represent knowledge from all people and by all people. To this end, we need to meet our users where they are. Today:
- language is a barrier to sharing in knowledge. Content should be available to our users in their languages.
- text-only knowledge is a blocker for gathering knowledge, especially from parts of the world that are already left behind. Our systems should become technologically receptive to accepting and allowing editability of new forms of knowledge (e.g., voice for oral knowledge).
- limits in proficiency and literacy is a blocker for our users. The content and its presentation will need to become a function of these parameters.
Knowledge as a service
Our goal is to offer KAS: both in terms of the infrastructure that supports it as well as the content of it. To do this, we need to:
- empower our users to learn, create, and go beyond consuming content: Wikimedia projects' talk and discussion pages are an asset for building systems that can help our users think critically and learn how to deliberate. We need to do research to surface this critical thinking and step by step deliberation to gain insights from it, and share it with others as part of our KAS effort.
- do research and development on building systems where deliberation and decision making can be possible at scale. Today, there is no such system available but one of the building blocks of KAS is infrastructure for discussion, deliberation, and decision making.
- empower our users with ways to assess the trustworthiness of the content. Trust and reputation become especially important as we move to new forms of knowledge such as oral knowledge. We should do research to build trust and reputation models for Wikimedia and its users and understand how to surface such metrics as measures of reliability of the knowledge we serve.
